Saturday, October 4, 2014

Yes, Texas does make good wine

... and that really was a dust storm I landed in.

Lost Draw Vineyards, near Brownfield, Texas

From the Oct/Nov issue of Garden and Gun:

I looked down from the 757 at crop circles cut in dirtby irrigators on wheels, a vast dun-colored landscape pinned to the geology by galloping telephone
poles. The plane landed in a dust storm, with me trying to imagine how people—much less grapevines—
lived here. I had come looking for the origins of the best wine in Texas, knowing that the state wins its share
of medals in national wine taste-offs and has a glitzy, Napa-wannabe wine trail in the Hill Country near
Austin and San Antonio. But I also knew that, if there was soul in those bottles, most likely it arrived in tanker trucks after a six-hour hard haul from much farther west, starting right here on the Texas High Plains.

People like to say there’s nothing between
the THP and the North Pole to stop the wind
but barbed wire. The area is also called the
Llano Estacado—the Palisaded Plain or, more
commonly, the Staked Plain—and at up to
5,000 feet in altitude a testament to endurance and conquistadorial madness. Coronado
passed through in 1541, looking for a city of
gold, and found more or less what you find
today with the exception of assorted structures protruding from the 360-degree horizon. Disoriented, harassed by Comanche,
Coronado ordered his soldiers to drive stakes
into the ground, according to local lore, so he
could find his way back to Mexico.
There were no fine wine grapes on the
Llano Estacado in those days, but now dozens of European varieties of Vitis vinifera
grow here, and from them flow good wine and
good stories. Like that of the man who met me
outside the Lubbock airport in an old pickup.
He wore Levi’s, a plaid shirt, a down vest, and
sneakers (cowboy boots don’t cut it on cold
concrete winery floors). The crease in his graying beard was full of white teeth. “Gol-lee,” he
said, “it’s almost seventy degrees, and tonight
it’s dropping into the twenties. Welcome to
West Texas.”
He was Kim McPherson. His father, Doc
McPherson, was a chemistry professor at Texas
Tech and a true pioneer of the state’s modern-era wine industry. Back in the sixties, Doc and
a colleague found vines that researchers had
thrown out and planted them next to Doc’s patio, without knowing exactly what they were.
Some flourished, proving that fine wine grapes could take the climate. (Doc also tried planting
grapevines from Spain that one of his students
had wrapped around the rims of a used VW Bug
and smuggled over aboard a ship.) From these
serendipities sprang an industry and a way of
life no one predicted for the THP.

In the seventies Doc and his friend started a
winery called Llano Estacado on the outskirts
of Lubbock. Though they later sold out, the
winery remains part of the McPherson legacy
and is now the second largest producer in the
state, bottling upwards of 180,000 cases annually. Texas as a whole now makes about 1.2 million cases of wine a year, although it remains a
vinous puppy compared with, say, Bordeaux
or California. (Little Napa Valley alone produces enough grapes for some 9 million cases.) Wine was made in Texas out of various fruits
from early on, but Prohibition shut down what
little commercial production had once existed. Now, the industry is growing rapidly—270
wineries at last count. So far, however, the national swirl-and-sniff press hasn’t given Texas
wine much good ink, the general belief among
critics being that the state concentrates too
heavily on its swilling tourist trade.
The THP is the second largest viticultural
area in Texas, behind the Hill Country, but it
has a bare handful of wineries and an overall
paucity of fruit. Llano Estacado is by far the area’s largest winery, and it has to buy grapes and
juice from elsewhere, including New Mexico
and California, to meet ambitious commercial
goals. McPherson Cellars, started in Lubbock
by ole Doc’s son in 2000, has a tenth of Llano
Estacado’s production, and though it too may supplement on occasion, the vast majority
of its wines are made only with grapes grown
right there on the plains.

Kim McPherson believes strongly in terroir,
that unique combination of soil and climate
that creates truly distinctive wine. This has
gained him a considerable following in Texas
and beyond. It was Kim to whom I was referred
whenever I asked knowledgeable people about
Lone Star viticulture, one adding pointedly,
“He’s an individualist.” A vineyardist told me,
“Kim can be blunt. I wasn’t sure I wanted to
get into business with him. Thank God I did.”
Kim drove me past the Buddy Holly Center
and the old Cactus movie theater, along sparsely populated streets typical of small Western
cities that emptied decades ago and are beginning to refill as suburbanites seek better
schools and something to do at night. He pulled
in behind a low building on Texas Avenue left
over from the thirties, a classic example of art
deco and functional minimalism that had once
been the local Coca-Cola bottling plant.
“I wanted to hear the fire engines,” he said,
of his decision to build his winery here, instead of out on the plains. The long, curvilinear
“pillbox” window on the sidewalk that once
offered a view of Coke’s bottling line now revealed visitors happily bending their elbows
next to stemmed glasses of red and white
wine. We joined them and in the next hour
went through a dozen McPherson wines from
screw-cap bottles, a proven technology still
not embraced by traditionalists but accepted
by edgier winemakers.
What surprised me about the wines was their quality, and consistency. No matter what grape had gone into the bottle, they all had originated in hot European climates, and all had a recognizable McPherson signature: balance, structure, and lean, bright fruit well suited to assertive food.

“We’re the Ribera of America,” Kim said, a reference to the Ribera del Duero, one of Spain’s choice wine-producing districts on the dry, rocky northern plateau. It produces Tempranillo, Mourvèdre, and other varieties Kim thinks best suited to the THP. “The fruit behaves a little different here,” because of the extremes of temperature. “During growing season it’s ninety degrees during the day and sometimes forty at night. So we get great color and body.” He grows some cabernet sauvignon—still the darling of American red wines—in a small legacy vineyard started by his father, but he isn’t really interested in grape varieties from Bordeaux. “When I mention merlot to Kim,” one of his growers told me, “he makes a spitting sound.” My favorite McPherson red was La Herencia, which means “inheritance.” (“Which I’ve spent,” Kim added.) The wine’s a blend of mostly Tempranillo with Carignan, Grenache, and Mourvèdre, all widely used in Spain, and Syrah from the hot Rhône Valley in southern France. Kim doesn’t hesitate to blend grapes associated with different countries, and even mixes colors, a no-no in more genteel climes. (His Tre Colore is a blend of Carignan, Mourvèdre, and Viognier, a white Rhône variety that does exceptionally well on the THP.) I also liked his unblended Roussanne, a full- bodied Rhône white.

The McPhersons, father and son, have the reputation as the collective patriarchs of Texas wine. It was Doc who encouraged Kim to attend the University of California at Davis to learn winemaking, and later urged him to leave the less-stressful winemaking in NoCal to return to Texas and make wine for Llano Estacado Winery. A dutiful son, Kim complied, saying only, “I didn’t think you’d insist, Doc.” Kim said of his time in Napa, where he worked for Trefethen Family Vineyards and others and knew many of the people who went on to enological fame, “I didn’t give a big one about the Texas High Plains then. Now I’d love to get four or five guys here together, the ones that do a really good job, and put on a dog and pony show. Bring Texas wines to the forefront.” Eventually Kim went out on his own—with Doc’s encouragement—and has since been recognized as the THP’s vinous Yoda. Doc him- self had died just a few months before my visit, at age ninety-five. “Doc’s old ticker finally wore out,” Kim said, without elaboration. We crossed the street to La Diosa (the Goddess) Cellars, a bistro run by Kim’s wife, Sylvia. Dark tiles, Spanish art on the walls, good
smells. A lean hombre in a black shirt sat alone
at the bar. He said as we passed, without turning around, “They’ve run out of Herencia,”
an ominous pronouncement. The scene was
straight out of the 1890s except that the man
wasn’t talking hooch but wine made fifty yards
from where he sat. And it wasn’t a double-action Colt, the weapon that enabled Texans to
prevail over the Comanche, next to his hand,
but a luminous iPad.

Kim and I sat at a table and I ordered home-
made empanadas. We drank tea but kept talking wine. Herencia costs $12 a bottle and could
sell for twice that, if the world knew about it.
So could many of Kim’s wines. “Down in the
Hill Country you could get forty dollars for
it,” he said. “That’s pretty spendy.” I asked
why he didn’t price them higher. “I like to
think of myself as a friend of the working-man,” and he added, “Millennials like these
oddball wines.” While older American wine
drinkers are stuck in the high-alcohol cabernet/chardonnay ditch, unglamorous varietals
like Tempranillo, Sangiovese, Mourvèdre,
Aglianico, and Albariño are cruising past in
stemmed glasses held by thirty-somethings.

That night in my hotel room I listened
to the wind on the other side of sealed windows. When I swept back the drapes, I saw a
layer of dust on the sill and, outside, light poles
bobbing in the horizontal gale. There was snow
on the ground, and a few hours before it had
been seventy degrees. This climate would give
anything color and body.
One of Kim’s growers, Andy Timmons,
picked me up the next morning and we headed
west across flat, dry farmland, past Ropesville
(“Ropes”), the soil on one side of the road a red-
dish color signifying iron, on the other a choc-
olate brown studded with old cotton stalks. I
had encountered reminders of the Deep South
other than the Coca-Cola bottling plant—towering lemon meringue pies and “chicken fried
chicken” at the Cast Iron Grill, for instance—but cotton was the strongest. Lubbock had
been named for Colonel Thomas S. Lubbock, a
former Confederate officer and a Texas Ranger.
Texas got plenty of Southern farmers after the
Civil War who left notes on kitchen tables at home, scrawled with the letters“GTT,”familiar to many a left-behind wife and sweetheart:
Gone to Texas. Today, cotton is still the state’s
foremost crop, far ahead of grapes. Yet new
vineyards were being planted even as we rode.

Timmons wore a little goatee and drove
his big four-door Ram pickup—“the Texas
truck”—with care. “Grapes don’t like wet
feet,” he said. “There’s clay in this red dirt,
where the vines grow best, but not enough to
prevent good drainage.” The stress vines need
to build character, he added, includes minimal
rainfall that limits grape size and concentrates
flavor. But with only about nineteen inches
of rain a year, and ambient moisture often as
low as 15 percent, the THP can have too much
of a good thing. “Grapes get a little shrivel on
them,” he said, when wind moves towers of
dust, haboob-like, across the land.
Irrigation is a desperate standoff between
the twin specters of evaporation and a falling
water table. The THP sits at the dead end of
the abused Ogallala Aquifer, which starts up
in South Dakota. Growers use drip irrigation,
just as in California, but many bury their lines
to minimize evaporation—and then have to
dig them up again after they freeze. Sudden
frost often arrives late in the spring, as it did in
2013, the harvest from hell when vines were
struck three times during bud break and the
forming grapes dropped to the ground. Then
in early May the temperature fell to 26 degrees, and 80 percent of that harvest gave up
the ghost.
Timmons had daringly installed four wind
machines at a cost of more than $30,000
apiece as frost protection. The traditional
method—coating the clusters with water
that in a cold snap will freeze and thus protect
the grape inside—was too expensive because
of the cost of water. The machines come on
automatically at 32 degrees and temporarily
move cold air out of the vineyard, a system that
works in isolated valleys but until Timmons’s
gamblehadneverbeenprovedontheTHP.
“People think I’m crazy,” he said, “but all
you need to do to justify the cost is save one
vintage.” That in itself indicates just how valuable are grapes capable of producing fine wine.
As it turned out, this past spring would prove
to be the worst yet for grapes on the THP, and
Timmons’s wind machines indeed saved much
of his crop.
Quality grapes can’t be grown just anywhere.
The THP has real terroir, as Kim McPherson
and others were demonstrating. The demand
for good grapes already outstrips what the state
grows. The common sense of planting hot-climate varieties here, despite their difficulties
of survival, is as clear as a windless morning,
but identifying the best blends, after the grapes
have become wine, is still a work in progress.

Such experiments must have once been
conducted in Greece, Sicily, Tuscany, Rioja,
the Rhône Valley, Bordeaux. The THP shares
a living provenance going back to prehistoric
times in the Ural Mountains, on the other side
of the earth, where Vitis vinifera came from.
The THP’s search for what Andy Timmons called “the Texas taste”—a signature of quality and subtle distinction—could well have been called “the Mesopotamian taste” millennia ago. Listening to him, I had a vision of some THP blend dancing in a bottle labeled “Plainage,” or “Mirage,” sitting on a restaurant table in Charleston, New York, London, Madrid, or Beijing.

Unexpected lines cross in the THP:
ethnic, historic, viticultural. Coronado’s
failed expedition left behind a lot of destruction but also made a cultural addition to native Mesoamerica. It’s ironic that his country
is also the origin of so many of the grapes that
are proving themselves here, in intensely flavorful wine conjuring up distant landscapes
as it washes down a shaving of Manchego or
a fajita, some foie gras or a braised short rib.

“We’re still trying to figure it out,” I was told
by the head winemaker at Llano Estacado
Winery, Greg Bruni. He had taken me out to
see one more vineyard, reinforcing the max-
im that without good grapes you can’t make
good wine. Bruni wore a padded Windbreaker
between himself and the elements, and he
gestured affectionately toward gnarly old cab-
ernet sauvignon vines—“cab sauv”—planted
by an Indian from Mumbai named Vijay Reddy,
a soil scientist. “These grapes are blended with our Sangiovese to produce Viviano,” he said, refer-
ring to a Llano Estacado wine and a “super
Texan,” a special category. (The same blend
was used in the seventies in Tuscany, where
the Italians called it “super Tuscan.”) Viviano
was the first Texas wine I had ever tasted, and
that mouthful of flavor had brought me to West
Texas, only to learn that cabernet is far from
the backbone of winemaking on the Llano.
Reddy, for instance, was growing twenty-eight
other varieties as well.
Bruni worked for fourteen years in winer-
ies in the Santa Cruz Mountains and could
have climbed more in NoCal’s vinous meritocracy, just as Kim McPherson could have.
He had recently gotten a dose of perspective
on what he and his High Plains colleagues are
up against, when he visited Napa and told a
viticulturist there about the THP’s drought,
wind, dust, hail, brutal winters, and bud-
killing frosts. “He said, ‘I don’t know what to
tell you. We don’t have any of those problems.
My main job is not to screw things up that happen naturally.’”
The hardship and the uncertainty of any
given harvest seem to unite THP winemakers
in common cause. Llano Estacado Winery may
make ten times as much wine as McPherson
Cellars, but the two are intimately linked.
“Kim makes such beautiful wines,” Bruni said.
“We’re lucky to have him here. I’ve known him
for twenty years and feel like he’s a brother.”
He added, “It’s all about pioneering. The struggle requires passion, and we’ve got that here
on the High Plains.”